


holy sails

by gogollescent



Category: Friends at the Table (Podcast)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-17
Updated: 2018-12-17
Packaged: 2019-09-21 10:03:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17041670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: Signet, leaving home.





	holy sails

The Divines dwarf the ships. From afar, the fleet looks like a handful of exhausted swimmers, treading darkness-with-stars; and Signet still considers herself an observer, though it’s a feeling she will have to overcome. She hasn’t left Belgard since Belgard left the Mirage. Belgard has been almost silent: no reminders, no anecdotes. Maybe she no longer needs the reminder that they’re not alone.

I thought I was quite the coldhearted young Excerpt, Signet tells her, resting her cheek on one strap of the cradle. When I met you.

You? says Belgard. There’s a whir of wings rising—no, Belgard’s wings are too big (and piecemeal) to whir. But there’s the hiss as shields detach, and the dry hum in Signet’s skin, too, of a stretched limb, of greater range. Belgard thinks she’s funny. Well, that’s nice. 

*

Blooming appears on the outside of the cockpit, in something like an old-fashioned diver’s suit, with four viewports to the helmet. Compulsion still drifts at the far end of the line, holding formation. Blooming knocks.

“Uh, there’s a door code… Never mind,” Signet says, alarmed by how hoarse her voice has grown from three days’ rest and relaxation. She sends out the Exuvia, which has been napping on her shoulder, and adds a message: “Come on in.” 

Hearing her, Belgard’s mosaic-skin slides Blooming toward the airlock. Then in another moment she feels Blooming swaying on the lower-story ladder; every nerve in Belgard links to another nerve. She climbs, reluctantly, out of her cradle, only to discover one foot is asleep. “Ow!”

“Signet?”

She looks up. Her foot rolled out from under her and now is dryly full of pins and needles, but she has her weight secure on one leg. She has very good balance, which frees her to massage her ankle like an old lady. It’s hard to stop doing it, even with Blooming there, and Blooming is _very_ there, as tall and anxious as ever.

“Hi. Sorry about all the mess,” Signet says, meaning the sterile cleanliness, the still-beautiful vaulting. “I’ve been taking some time for myself.”

“You’ve been handling all the naturalization protocols for new arrivals…”

“Well, asking people about themselves is easy,” says Signet, more bluntly than she means to. “Inhabiting a space like a human being is harder.”

That gets a rare smile. Blooming does seem happier, with the Waking Cadent, but she doesn’t laugh often, and her smiles are reserved for moments of shared honesty, when—it seems—she knows exactly where she stands. The truth is, it hurts to know that every time she laughed as Empyrean’s excerpt, she felt obliged to. Blooming happy, Blooming at peace with her service, is Blooming serious, moved most by pity, and indifferent to—even suspicious of—any upending crack of surprise. But Signet hoped for a long time that she was doing good work by teasing Blooming out of her shell, or that by coaxing Blooming she was climbing from some shell. And their little jokes made one shield between them. One of many, to be sure.

“I could bring over some things,” says Blooming, and turns to survey the room, so that Signet can drop her foot and test some weight on it. It’s fine—still numb and sparking in places, but a foot again, not a hefty prosthetic. “I have your old projector curtains.”

“You do? Why?”

“I… don’t know. I think you gave them to me? For movie nights.”

“Oh! Right. How could I forget that?”

It’s supposed to be rhetorical, even if it comes out a little earnestly hapless. But Blooming repeats, “I don’t know. You seem tired.”

“I’ve _been_ resting,” Signet complains, and sits back down in the swing, since Blooming hasn’t even taken her boots off. Either embarrassment will get Blooming to unbend too, or it’ll give the conversation some zip. Something has to happen here. The present has its merits, but for now, and almost for the first time in a long while, Signet wants to go back to her dreams.

“I’ll bring the curtains, and some curry, and some muffins. And a movie, maybe.” Blooming makes no move to go. The lights flicker, not a hardware glitch, but done to remind Signet of cities—the planetside cities and the great ships, with public transport less than perfectly smooth. Belgard is always trying to bring little pieces of lost things to her, with an undisguised thrift that makes the gesture no less persuasive. Because it’s not a simulation, but a symbol. _Somewhere else._ But Blooming seems uneasy, helmet under arm.

“She’s fine,” Signet says.

“I’m not worried about Belgard.”

“We’re fine.”

“Are you? You sound like a teenager, you know that? You sound like me.”

“I never thought of that as a bad thing,” Signet says by reflex, and is disheartened to see tears start from Blooming’s eyes. Blooming smears them away with her wrist, not too roughly—abashed, but no worse than abashed. “Not that… I’m glad you’ve found a place where you can be easy. I’m trying too. I really am fine. Did you come here to tell me something, prince?”

“Not my name,” Blooming says instantly, “that’s not my name.” She’s been waiting for Signet to make this mistake, it would seem. It’s sad that they’ve spoken so little that it hasn’t happened till now. Before Signet can apologize, she plunges on. “I guess ‘Carpet’ doesn’t have the same ring to it. I came because I wanted to… I wanted to ask why… Why you came. Even at the end, after you got what you wanted from Polyphony. Wasn’t that why you knelt?”

Signet takes a moment to organize her answer. Dreams or no dreams, she has to recall that the Blooming who helped her conquer Ache was not this Blooming; that the Blooming she wanted to protect was not this Blooming; and that this Blooming is the truth again. In a creaking suit. She is her own past’s equal, no less deserving of interested care. And anyway, didn’t Signet fail all those others? Poor Prince, who did so well in the skies over the vale—a blue shimmer of substance, a whoop of pride, fearful dexterity in flight—real then, not now, but abandoned before she ever vanished. Why not try here, with a chance at success? She’s been in the habit of knowing that hopelessness makes the work easier. But now hope pries and lifts up her hard heart.

“I knelt because I enjoy forms and ceremony. They give comfort in a volatile age. As for your other question, I can’t answer it yet. I’ll only know why I came once I’ve done it. Otherwise… it may be I followed for no reason, although it’s nice to be here with you. It’s possible, in my time here, I will achieve nothing of importance.”

“What kind of thing is that to say? You saved the Mirage!”

“Me?” It’s not that Signet isn’t flattered. She holds out her hands, cupped, and Blooming comes and sets her huge gloved hand there. It’s still cold from space, but Signet is protected. “I don’t think you can claim to have saved something until you know how it ends.”

Blooming does laugh at that—throws her head back and laughs. “Signet. Are you planning to outlive this fleet, too?”


End file.
